DDD7 - My Thoughts

November 23, 2008

Yesterday, I attended my first DeveloperDay
at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. Below are the sessions that I
attended and my thoughts on them:

TDD and Hard-To-Test Code - Ian Cooper

The first session of the day was about testing code which is hard to
test. The speaker, Ian Cooper, clearly had a lot of experience and
knowledge about the subject. Unfortunately however, I felt that there
wasn’t really enough code. Most of the presentation was about the sort
of code that is hard-to-test, I was hoping for more help with how to
test that code. Having said that, I still found the talk informative
and interesting. The concept of ‘Seams’ was something I hadn’t come
across by that name before (see
here
for a good example), although it is basically the Open/Closed Principle.

Having followed MVC from the first preview, I was very interested in
this presentation. The format was very much about code not PowerPoint
which I personally liked. I thought Steve was extremely knowledgeable
about MVC, and he really showed how easy MVC can be to create a fully
functional website. Despite not really learning much from the
presentation (I’d used most of the code he used already myself), I
really enjoyed the fast pace of it. I think anyone in the audience that
hadn’t already used MVC will have downloaded it by now! He sold it
very well. Definitely a speaker to look out for the in future.

Steve also has an MVC book coming out
soon - definitely one for the wish list!

This was my most eagerly anticipated session. However, it ended up
being a bit of a disappointment. The two speakers were unable to talk
much about ASP.NET v4 as Microsoft didn’t announce them at the PDC.
Although they did show some nice features of VS 2010 (adornments look
very nice!), it seemed as if the presentation was put together in a
rush. I didn’t feel that there was very much ‘meat’ in the talk, and it
was only the ability of the presenters to make the audience laugh that
kept it going.

Oslo, Microsoft’s vision for the future of Modelling - Robert Hogg

An interesting session about Oslo, something I didn’t know too much
about. The subject was clearly too big to talk about in just one hour,
but Rob did cover quite a few things. Oslo’s main aim is to increase
pretty much everything by TEN TIMES! Productivity, performance,
everything! Bold aims. It’ll be interesting to see how much of it they
can achieve. The idea of improving the communication between BA’s,
Architects and Dev’s could make a huge difference to the future of the
industry if they can pull it off. Oh, and the modelling tool Quadrant
looks like it could become a showpiece WPF application. Very shiny!

This was a good presentation to finish the day on, as my brain was
starting to hurt! Didn’t contain anything earth-shattering, but was an
excellent introduction to the new features we can expect to have in the
future versions of browsers. Just a shame that it will probably take
years for all browsers to implement them (I’m looking at you IE!).
Overall, a fun talk which Helen improved by getting some good audience
participation.

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed my first DeveloperDay overall. I think in the future I will
try to attend the sessions that I’m unfamiliar with, as I believe I will
get more out of it that way - they are overviews rather than training
sessions after all, so if you already have an overview of a technology
pick a topic you don’t know instead.